With all the talk about AI this and AI that you would think that Artificial Intelligence was easy. What is not apparent is that these AI advances are not native AI. They are the equivalent of thin client environments that connect lesser compute hardware to the real AI’s that reside within more massive environments. These AI (Ailites?) as we can call them, consist of front end audio parser’s (for input) and text to speech programs. In between there is a communications that forwards these parsed ‘language’ requests to a real AI that does the interpretation of the request and creates the text response that will be returned and spoken by the text to speech process on the client.

This all seems pretty interesting, but not a lot different than Apple’s SIRI, Mycroft, Google’s Speak or Amazon’s Alexa. These systems all have one thing in common, and that is to collect information on everything we do. Profiling technologies that will tailor responses and requests but will also record our interests and activities just like our browser activities do.

This are not the AI’s you are looking for. (but may be a lot of fun to play with)

While working on an TCP/IP problem today, I was finally struck by the fact that we have for all intents and purposes expended the entire TCPv4 addressing space. I knew it was coming, years ago, but now while testing IP addresses, it dawned on me.

You can now pick any arbitrary set of numbers nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn and expect a response. Ping them, probe them, something will be there, or it’s being held. All gone, this is the equivalent of spitting in the middle of an ocean while swimming, you are going to hit ocean.

Amazon Aurora for the RDS is more or less on hold for the company I’m working for, it looks like it works, but it’s not a consistent performance across all the SQL that is deployed here. Having said that if you are starting a project, this might be a functional alternative to MySQL. But at this point neither the increase performance shown, on only part of our BI queries, and the massive down time in any attempt to to move to Aurora from MySQL does not merit a change. Should things change, like Oracle forcing a pricing change on Amazon, this option will be reconsidered. I just wish that AWS would consider implementation of MariaDB within the RDS environment.

Being a user of MySQL (5.6) on the Amazon RDS I was impressed with the announcement of Aurora. Having said that I was also suspicious as to it’s providence. Nowhere were there references to it’s origins or engines. Databases and database systems don’t just drop out of the sky.

Amazon were also was making comparisons to MySQL version 5.6, not the newest version 5.7.x. This is interesting as I have been fighting I/O issues in the RDS implementations of MySQL 5.6.x for sometime. Version 5.6 has serious Mutex issues in I/O and from my reading MySQL 5.7 has managed to improve that situation. But the Amazon folks have not managed that upgrade yet.

Software politics being what it is, especially with regards to Oracle, whom own MySQL, indicates that there will be licensing issues with the release of MySQL 5.7.x. Issues that Amazon may be seeking to side step or ameliorate with the threat of Aurora (or MariaDB).

Having said that, many of the DB community seem to be of the opinion that Aurora does not offer anything that can’t be found within the MySQL 5.7 upgrade, as far as performance is concerned.

What does concern me is the lack of transparency about the nature of Aurora. What I see is smoke and mirrors. And frankly in the DB community, that does not lend trust to the Aurora project of Amazon’s. Not a good thing where trust, and dependability are Keys. (pun intended)

Well, I’ve worked myself out of another job, mostly, as I assisted the current company into the Amazon cloud. They were operating their system from a hosting environment, so they were mostly in the ‘Cloud’ anyway. And as you might guess I dislike the whole ‘Cloud’ hype as it’s mostly a marketing term. So what I convinced them to do, is improve their scalability by moving the server into the equivalent systems in the Amazon ‘hosting’ environment.

As part of the exercise the database from move from a MySQL database on Windows server, to the Amazon RDS the the webserver/application servers (windows) to EC2 instances, with additional storage in the Amazon S3 facility.

The process was, as usual, a learning experience, and Amazon still has issues with their interfaces to their corner of the Cloud. But it all works, I managed to defrag the database, and apply more indexing and SQL revisions to the point that it runs so smoothly, they don’t need me anymore. Hence the working myself out of a job. Amazon should hire me to sell their services.

It is with sadness that I had to turn off the last Sybase Instance we had running. Our last ASE server quietly shutdown on an Amazon EC2 server on Tuesday the 20th of December, never to boot again.

In all truth both Sybase instances were developer installs operating as production systems. Our two instances, operating with the 25 user limit that each was restricted to, was barely able to operate the system. But the Sybase Licensing was too archaic and inflexible to continue operating it as a small business. Thus the economics forced us to convert to MySQL.

If it hadn’t been for the previous management, who in some delusion of saving money, refused to pay the datacenter bill, forcing us to move the Sybase instances out into the Amazon cloud (EC2) in the first place we would probably have been on MySQL sooner, as that was the plan.

But the sadness remains, Sybase as a technology proved again that it would run, and run reliably, on just about any hardware, even when it was virtual, and NOT meeting the specified certified, requirements of operation. Which can’t be said for the Amazon RDS version of MySQL, which crashed spontaneously while applying an index on our live production database without warning. This having happened after weeks of testing and trial runs at operating the system on it. The only defense, the RDS instance rebooted and was available without data loss, in less time than a Sybase HA switchover would have taken, a system this production system was developed from.

So we are up in MySQL and I am now a MySQL DBA exclusively, after spending the last 25 years as a Sybase DBA and evangelist. The decision now has to be rather to remain so, or find another place of employment where Sybase remains. Those are becoming more and more rare. Maybe I should takeup MongoDB to stay at the cutting edge.